We Smell A Rat

And Other Bad Movie Moments

The Worst Of The Worst

(in No Particular Order)

December 19, 1999|By Contributing: Mark Caro and Michael Wilmington.

`SUPERSTAR'

Are you charmed and amused by a 35-year-old actress (Molly Shannon, right) pretending to be a hostile Catholic high school girl whose most distinctive characteristic is sticking her hands under her armpits and sniffing them? Didn't think so.

`20 DATES'

Moviemaker Myles Berkowitz's L.A. dating life recorded, ineptly, by hidden cameras. Often, he behaves so obnoxiously that his fed-up dates say they never want to see him again. (Neither do we.)

`LOVE STINKS'

So does this comedy about a TV writer and his thoroughly repugnant, manipulative girlfriend.

`MY FAVORITE MARTIAN'

The '60s comedy sci-fi TV series, turned into an unfunny, shrieking, reeking debacle, in which the audience is (almost literally) thrown in the toilet.

`WILD, WILD WEST'

Unshakable evidence that big studios should put a moratorium on TV show-inspired extravaganzas. A "Howdy Doody" remake might have been better.

`JAWBREAKER'

A would-be happy-go-lucky teen musical ("Heathers" crossed with "Grease") about murderous schoolgirls. They should have gone after the filmmakers.

`BABY GENIUSES'

If hell turns out to be located in a movie theater, you can bet it will show a movie about wisecracking babies who stick it to bad guys. What did Kathleen Turner do to deserve this?

`THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC'

Luc Besson's lavish but flabbergastingly trashy bio-epic of France's national heroine. This movie deserves to be burned at the stake.

`FRIENDS & LOVERS'

It's amateur hour on the ski slopes of Park City, Utah, as friends work out their love-life and parental issues in what could be an R-rated, indie variation on "The Brady Bunch."

`LOST & FOUND'

David Spade is such a smug, obnoxious little twerp in this gross-out comedy that you don't root for him to land Bond girl Sophie Marceau; you just want the Chris Farley look-alike to sit on him.

`THE MOD SQUAD'

This incoherent, pointless, stupid, decidedly ungroovy update of the late '60s/early '70s cop show sets yet another standard for lame TV remakes and makes the talented Giovanni Ribisi look like the worst actor in the world.

DISHONORABLE MENTIONS

WORST PORTRAYAL OF A FRENCH MEDIEVAL PREPPIE CHEERLEADER WHO, LIKE, HEARS VOICES: Milla Jovovich in "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc."

WORST PERFORMANCE BY A CURRENT POLITICIAN IN A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE: Rudy Giuliani ogles Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn making out in Central Park in "The Out of Towners."

CASTING SO BAD YOU THINK IT MUST BE A JOKE BUT IT'S NOT: Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Christmas Jones in "The World Is Not Enough."

MOST INAPPROPRIATE ANALOGY: The equation of Melanie Griffith's murder of her husband with Civil Rights-era blacks' quest for freedom in "Crazy in Alabama."

WORST REASON FOR IMAX TO EXISt: "Siegfried & Roy: The Magic Box."

MOVIE TITLE MOST RESEMBLING A THREAT: "Pokemon: The First Movie."

MOST IRRITATING PIANO MUSIC: "Eyes Wide Shut."

WORST CAPITALIZATION: "eXistenZ."

WORST TIMING: "EDtv" (9 months after "The Truman Show").

DUMBEST CHARACTER MOTIVATION: The Ashley Judd character in "Double Jeopardy" opts to spend six years in jail away from her young son so she can go after her husband with a gun rather than telling anyone that the husband is alive and getting her false murder conviction overturned.